Author Jennifer Clement has studied at NYU, in Paris, France, and received an MFA from the Stonecoast program at the University of Southern Maine. She is the first woman elected to head PEN International. Clement has published four novels to national acclaim and received a Gugenheim Fellowship to write “Gun Love,” which just came out in March.
Indian Waters Trailer Park is like any one of a thousand other half deserted lots full of rusted homes up on cement blocks that dot the central Florida landscape. Far from Disney World, historic St. Augustine, or the pristine Gulf of Mexico, Indian Waters sits next to a reeking garbage dump. For fourteen years Pearl and her mother Margot have lived in the visitor’s parking lot in their 1994 red Mercury Topaz. Margot has the back seat, Pearl gets the front so that she can do her homework on the dashboard.
Author Jennifer Clement creates a remarkably authentic voice in Pearl, our precocious, highly observant narrator throughout this short but powerful novel. Pearl is the embodiment of everything we mean when we refer to the resilience of children. She has known nothing else but the Mercury. She has only one friend in the trailer park. She loves her mother but is cognizant of her faults. Margot avoids Child Protective Services and feeds her daughter from the proceeds of her janitorial job at the nearby veterans’ hospital. They eat on Limoges china, one of the few items Margot rescued from her privileged past before she left home, pregnant and alone at seventeen.
In heartbreaking detail Pearl describes the layout of her car/house, how she and her mom store their toothpaste and brushes in the glove compartment along with the Raid flying insect killer. While other children dream of ponies and farms, Pearl dreams of a real desk and a chair. While Margot shares the geography lessons she learns from the veterans, she dreams of a winning lottery ticket or perhaps a man in shining armor.
But when men come into Margot’s life, there’s always a sense of foreboding. No one is as he seems, not the young drifter who spends a night or two in the front seat of the Mercury, or Eli Redmond, Pastor Rex’s old friend up from Texas who eventually moves into the back seat, mesmerizing Margot to the point where she seldom shows up to work anymore and loses track of her beloved daughter. Pearl, uncomfortable in the Mercury when Eli is around, breaks into a deserted trailer where she reads and naps with only one distraction, the mounting piles of guns acquired by Pastor Rex every